City Research Online

Abstract

Agenda-setting theory and warfare studies hold that setting the national agenda is strategically advantageous to foreign policy goals. We probe this theory on the RussoUkrainian War by analyzing the conflicting agenda set by RIA Novosti, RT Russian, RT International, BBC News Russian, and BBC News from February 2022 to July 2023. In contrast to previous work that identified press coverage misalignment to be largely concentrated in the framing of events, our study provides evidence of substantive and sustained misalignment in the event selection by revealing that Russian state media tailored a specific version of the news for Russian-speaking audiences, often downplaying key developments of the conflict, such as the mobilization crisis in Russia, the Wagner group rebellion, the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and the prospect of nuclear escalation. Our results contribute to understanding how modern Russian propaganda has shaped the public perception of the invasion of Ukraine.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	Agenda-setting; Propaganda; Russia; Ukraine; BBC; RIA; RT
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics D History General and Old World > DL Northern Europe. Scandinavia J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JZ International relations U Military Science
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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